Hello, everyone.
My title is chief innovation officer of the Winnipeg Health Authority. I'm based at the Health Sciences Centre, our community's largest hospital.
You folks just visited St. Boniface Hospital this morning. I spent 17 years of my life in Ray's riding, working as part of the core team putting up those two institutes. They're founded on an entrepreneurial model of pulling funds together, both for capital and operating expenses.
I also was co-founder of two venture capital funds in town and several spinoff companies that have come from them. My current project ties to the L5L project that you saw this morning in our presentation.
This picture I'm showing here is of the new Siemens Institute for Advanced Medicine that's being built at the front door of the Health Sciences Centre. This is a $200 million project being built with soft money. It is 80,000 square feet and will focus on the neurosciences, surgery of the future, advanced imaging, and simulation. The project contains a retail concourse and a 17-story hotel.
The naming rights of this institute were sold to Siemens AG, one of the largest multinationals in the world. In return, Siemens is putting research programs inside of the institute. The facility will be Siemens pure: when you flick a light switch, it will be a Siemens light switch; when you look at an MR scanner, it will be a Siemens MR scanner.
In return for having such an exclusive environment focused on one vendor, we will do proprietary research in ways that conventional collaborations would not normally take place.
The hotel made a contribution towards the institute in return for affiliation with our community's largest teaching hospital. To give you a sense of the business traffic that's affiliated with it, the NML that you visited this morning generates 25,000 hotel room nights a year just by itself—not counting the teaching hospital. How could I capture some of that volume for our campus? So the hotel is not just a place for guests to stay, but the intention is also to have revenue generation to help feed the indirect costs of the research institute.
The project you just saw is for $200 million. It will have a $30-million-a-year operating budget, with roughly 300 staff, and the majority of that funding will come from soft sources.
A third partnership we have in the institute is with the spinoff company that the National Research Council has launched, IMRIS. It makes an interoperative MR scanner that slides on a ceiling track through the OR and lets the surgeon take pictures during the surgery. This is the country's only IPO this year on the technology side. We're proud to be a showplace for this technology in a clinical setting.
We are also engaged in a very active partnership with CAE, the Quebec-based aircraft simulation company, with one entire floor of the institute focusing on CAE's diversification into the field of medical simulation. The first stage of product development from that will be the development of a new generation of medical mannequin. With medical mannequins, you can literally have babies simulate heart attacks. These are very, very sophisticated robotic devices, but they all come tied to a control room. Well, the new generation of medical mannequin that we're going to be creating with CAE is a completely self-contained unit that will allow people to go all the way from the ambulance to the emergency ward to surgery, up to the patient's bedroom.
We'll also be involved in the development of a virtual reality surgical trainer. Can we rehearse your surgery the day before we do it? How solid does that tumour feel? What does Harry Schulz's tumour exactly look like? What is it touching against? Let's both rehearse that procedure the day before and train students who are in the institute, and let's advance its integration with other types of devices.
The third part is a skills assessment unit in support of surgical training. Say we have a surgeon who's 75 years old. Can he still hit the button? My dad takes his driver's licence over again when he's 80, but we don't make our medical people do that.
So the notion of diversifying a big company like CAE into the medical field, taking advantage of the movement towards patient safety, is another very large project we're doing.
Now the last piece I want to leave with you is the relationship between the L5L project and the things you're seeing inside this new institute. The federal lab can never be as nimble because of the rules the federal bureaucracy is required to live under, with all kinds of very, very stiff things that are done under the mantle of accountability—but we're the marketplace. The Siemens Institute has operating rooms. They just look like the regular operating rooms that you and I might have surgery in tomorrow, but we're doing device development and we're working on prototypes.
Could we be using those ORs in the context of training for infection control? Maybe CAE is the contractor that's delivering that mission-critical training in an OR. You open up a patient who has a certain type of disease, an in-hospital infection that no one anticipated. Okay, team, react to that circumstance.
So that's the interrelationship with the OR of the future; we are also building a ward-of-the-future development in there. If one of those people you saw in a space suit today got a hole in it, where would we put them? Would they go into a regular hospital containment ward? Or might we have a special ward inside this new institute that is specially designed with the materials we were talking about, the infection control aspect that we were talking about today, new materials to have special kind of housing for those things?
The third element is the entrepreneurial side that I hope you picked up from my presentation. I'll bet you that in all of your hearings today and on your journeys, you aren't going to find people who are peddling retail to support research, or hotel rooms or taverns. This would be a novel approach, pulling together all sources of income I can find to make sure the institute has a long-term viability to it, that it's not just based on serendipitous research grants.
The last element is that we're looking at a large-scale real estate development north of William Avenue that will extensively move into the field in P3 development of both health care and research facilities to leverage on top of the business base of Manitoba's largest hospitals.
I know the committee is here principally on the issue of commercialization, and I have many suggestions on that, but I'll leave that for the question and answer period.